The present invention relates to cooking apparatus, especially to ovens which impart a smoke flavor to meats while they are being cooked.
Smoke ovens function to impart a smoke flavor to meat by cooking the meat in a smoke-filled atmosphere. It is conventional, for example, to provide a firebox in which wood is burned to generate smoke and heat, and to deliver the smoke and heat to an adjacent smoke oven. The oven contains vertically spaced rotary shelves on which the meat is placed and continually rotated at slow speed in the hot, smoky atmosphere. The shelves may contain openings to assure that smoke reaches all sides of the meat.
In such ovens it can be difficult to regulate the temperature throughout the cooking chamber so that the meat on all shelves is cooked at a constant uniform temperature.
It is also difficult to provide constant but different temperatures within the cooking chamber to enable different types of meat to be cooked at their individual cooking temperatures.
Commercial or high volume cooking facilities may require that other types of cooking operations, such as baking, charbroiling and frying for example, be carried out simultaneously with the roasting of meat. It would be desirable to enable all of those functions to be performed simultaneously on a common unit heated by a common heat source.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to minimize or eliminate problems of the types discussed above.
It is another object of the invention to provide a smoke oven which cooks similar meats at a uniform constant temperature throughout the cooking chamber, or different meats at different constant temperatures within the cooking chamber.
It is an additional object of the invention to enable different types of cooking functions to be performed at a common unit heated by a common source.
It is a further object of the invention to provide apparatus for simultaneously smoke roasting, baking, char-broiling and/or frying foods from a common source of heat.